


44 Days

by pwcorgigirl



Category: House M.D.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:00:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26035318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pwcorgigirl/pseuds/pwcorgigirl
Summary: Wilson volunteers as an ER doctor during the COVID-19 crisis, leaving House behind. The separation doesn't go well for either of them.
Relationships: Greg House & James Wilson
Comments: 5
Kudos: 24





	44 Days

**Title:** _44 Days_  
**Author:** pwcorgigirl .  
**Rating, warnings, genre, characters:** Rated for mid-teens and up. Refers to the premise of _A River Out of Eden_ by the late **Nightdog_barks** and **blackmare** , in which Wilson was cured of cancer. Many thanks to **blackmare** and **perspi** for their beta work. 3,150 words.

\----------

“You know how I feel about people who join groups, especially for lost causes,” House said, glaring at Wilson as a toiletry bag joined the stack of underwear in Wilson’s duffel bag.

“It’s not a lost cause. People are sick. It’s a community hospital. It needs doctors, even retired ones. It’s a few weeks of ER shifts so the regular staff has some respite.”

“In the middle of a pandemic,” House said. “Should I point out that you’re middle-aged and had cancer? That you were supposed to die from and didn’t? Unless there’s a genie in that bottle of fancy French aftershave, you are out of miraculous good luck.”

“The universe owes me, House,” Wilson said as he threw a handful of socks in after the underwear. “It needs to make up for three bad marriages and half a lifetime of you.” He picked up his electric razor, but House quickly plucked it from his hand.

“Take disposables. Don’t bring anything back.”

Wilson paused, his hand raised to grab the razor back, and then let his arm fall to his side. 

“Okay,” Wilson said and turned to the bathroom, where House kept a stash of disposable razors for his occasional shave. For the first time, Wilson was truly afraid about what he was about to do, but he didn’t want House to see that. House was too good at whipping off the noble covering of human actions and revealing the base cowardice underneath. He wasn't a saint or a martyr. He sometimes just missed being a doctor, although he never wanted to be an oncologist again, and this seemed like a natural way to get back into it, to help out without committing to a permanent job.

" _Locum tenens. Non compos mentis_. Latin's a great language for describing idiots," House said. He poked his head around the bathroom door. "Just don't die, okay? Seriously."

"I won't die, House," Wilson said. House scowled and walked away. 

\---

“I could have told you they weren’t going to let you come home,” House said sourly as he stared at Wilson’s exhausted face on the phone screen. “You spend twelve-hour shifts marinating in COVID-19, the virus that laughs at a shower and a clean pair of scrubs. Even if the hospital shrink-wrapped you, it wouldn’t be safe to send you back here for the weekends.”

“And I knew you’d rub it in, House,” Wilson said wearily. “You know what the on-call room does not have? You. Snoring like a fucking chainsaw.” He clicked the phone off.

House stared at the blank screen. “I miss you too,” he said, and dropped the phone on the bedside table.

\---

The wind in the ambulance bay was cold and plastered the yellow isolation gown to Wilson’s body. The paramedic opened the rear ambulance doors. “Mr. and Mrs. Raines, both in their mid-70s. She’s undergoing chemotherapy. He has COVID-19 symptoms: high fever sustained over several days, can’t catch his breath, hasn’t been eating. Both were too sick to get out of bed when we got there.” 

Wilson boosted up inside the ambulance as the paramedic crouched by a gurney looked up. “Doc," he said softly, "he coded on the way here. We couldn’t get him back.” Wilson nodded and turned to the other patient. “Mrs. Raines, we’re going to take care of you,” he said. She nodded weakly with her eyes closed.

Margie Raines died six hours later, with Wilson holding his phone to her ear so that she could hear her children telling her goodbye. 

\---

“You were right,” Wilson whispered into the phone. 

“What?” House mumbled groggily as he peered at the bedside clock. “It’s … after 3 a.m.” He cleared his throat and rubbed one eye with his fist.

“I shouldn’t have come here. It’s … it’s too much. It never stops.”

“Wilson,” he said. “You were going to … no, I didn’t stop you.” 

“It’s not your fault,” Wilson said. “Just talk. Just tell me about your day.”

“There’s not much to tell. Did you know there’s a toilet paper shortage out here? Thank God I still subscribe to _The New York Times_. Not sure how the trashman is going to feel when I start using pieces of it to wipe my ass.”

He heard the first strangled Wilson giggle from the phone.

“And now it’s totally okay to walk into the bodega wearing a bandana over my face. A week ago, Mr. Patel would have shot me, but now it’s a matter of public health that I don’t breathe on his display of Rock Star and rolling papers.”

A stifled guffaw. Who knew pandemic humor was a thing? 

“House?”

“What?”

“Thanks. Go back to sleep.”

He didn’t, though. He lay awake, the part of his brain that knew far too much about infectious diseases helpfully citing statistics and running a PowerPoint of horror scenes through his mind. Unbidden, he imagined Wilson dying a half-dozen different ways: slain by a cytokine storm, his lips blue from lack of oxygen, his heart ruined, his kidneys permanently shut down, his brain and nervous system invaded and conquered.

In the morning of the strange new world, liquor stores delivered. It was the only improvement House could think of.

\---

“I hear they’re having bake sales to buy gloves and masks,” House said. 

“Not quite. There may be some free cosmetic surgery for Mafia wives involved when this is all over, though,” Wilson said. He ran his hand through his hair, which three weeks overdue for a cut. “And that sexy Russian cardiologist on the hospital web page? Well, I think the director may have just prostituted him for a truckload of isolation gowns.” 

“Why, Jimmy. Your sense of humor’s back. Things better?” House sipped a mouthful of the second best bourbon that Pasha’s Finest Liquors had been able to deliver, Maker’s Mark being out of stock for the foreseeable future, along with hand sanitizer, soap, bread, ground beef, beans, canned soup, eggs, toilet paper, paper towels, and milk. 

“Hell, no. We’re all just numb. The ambulances might as well drive straight to the morgue, except that the morgue’s full and that does not bear thinking about.” 

“I can mail you booze. Would that help?”

“It wouldn’t hurt.”

\---

In the evenings, House often turned off the television and sat at the piano, playing by the streetlight's yellow glow that streamed through the windows of the living room. Next to a bank of leaky windows wasn’t the best spot for the piano, but it wasn’t the best piano, just an old studio upright that was getting too flat in the bass end.

It snowed a lot in New Hampshire, something he and Wilson had overlooked when they’d finally wrapped up years of wandering and settled down. They’d stayed on the Eastern seaboard because it felt natural to them, but had to be far enough away from New Jersey that no one they knew would accidentally discover House. 

Wilson could come and go as he pleased in the world, but House had, to a large extent, given that up for the false freedom of living in a dead heroin addict’s identity. Dr. Gregory House was dead and buried, all his credentials and knowledge gone up in a warehouse blaze, and the House left behind was free to never practice medicine again. 

That didn’t stop him from trawling the web, collecting bits and pieces of research about the new virus, delving into his memory and trying to make sense of it all. For the first time in years, he itched for a lab, a team, the power and funds to _do_ something.

And for the first time in a long time, he regretted the trade he’d made in that warehouse, of swapping one life for another. There were always variables: he hadn’t known Wilson would almost miraculously get well. He hadn’t planned ahead for getting used to living with him, or having him taken away again. He hadn’t counted on them having time, and then they did. 

House left his left hand fall hard on the bass keys. “Dammit, Wilson,” he whispered.

\---

A ER doctor, a respiratory tech, two nurses and a dietary aide at Wilson’s hospital were positive for the virus. Five days later, the aide and one of the nurses were dead, the doctor was intubated in ICU in critical condition, and the staff held a vigil in the empty parking lot. 

House watched the news coverage, his eyes honed in for a glimpse of Wilson among those holding their lighted cell phones in the snowy dusk, but he couldn’t find him.

\---

Wilson was there, enduring the cold at the back of the crowd near the ER doors. He’d stepped out for a second, long enough to hear the hospital chaplain say a few words about courage and sacrifice, before returning to a futile attempt to keep a formerly healthy 42-year-old breathing. A hour later, he had to make the call to her husband and listen to him sob until the man's mother took the phone away. 

He hadn't been homesick since summer camp when he was ten, when the afternoons all turned rainy and no one in the cabin really liked him, and the days passed with endless games of solitaire and the nights with a heavy ache for home in the middle of his chest. 

He felt that ache again that night and thought it was a shame that he was too old now to go cry in the bathroom. 

\---

An apartment without Wilson was like a wrist without a watch. 

House made attempts to keep life normal, whatever that was these days, but he had lost the knack of living alone after eight years of being with Wilson. Somehow Wilson’s half of the chores didn’t get done and House was somewhat bothered that he’d morphed from being the tidy bachelor he remembered to living in squalor. 

Some days he made an effort: busted out the vacuum cleaner, washed the dishes, made the bed, but the place was still half empty. The rest of the time even taking a shower seemed to be an effort. When he was really bored, he flicked marshmallows at the TV and gave himself an elaborate system of points for whatever part of Trump’s ugly face he managed to hit during the pandemic press conferences that he hated but couldn’t stop watching. 

“Trump looks at Fauci like he’s going to eat him alive and pick his teeth with his tiny arm bones,” House said after a particularly boozy bout of marshmallow warfare. The marshmallows were looking worse for wear and the TV screen was pocked with sticky marks.

“The nurses are all starting to get a crush on Fauci. They call him Tony the Tiger,” Wilson said. “I think it’s the ties.” 

House snorted. “You _would._ It’s the brains. Brains all the way.”

“And the … what’s the Italian version of chutzpah?”

“ _Faccia tosta_ ,” House said and hiccuped. “Did you get the package I sent? The wonderful gift of Polish ingenuity that turns potatoes into firewater?”

“Oh, yeah. The thing is, we’re never off call, so I can’t drink it. But I look at it and imagine.”

“Wilson, you are pathetic.”

“Hey, we have to have something to look forward to.” 

\---

Forty days without Wilson and House threw a book at the kitchen window. The book was _The Joy of Cooking_ and even House, inventive though he was, had run into one too many recipes that couldn’t be cooked because the apartment was missing ingredients and the corner bodega looked like obsessive-compulsive looters had been through.

There was always pizza delivery, but one more pizza and he’d be shitting out mozzarella balls. He missed decent food. He missed cooking. He missed Wilson. 

The window cracked, the book fell with a splash into the sink filled with dirty dishwater and House decided to get the hell out of town.

He’d gone only about seven miles on the deserted highway before the complete emptiness of the New Hampshire late winter landscape started to get to him. There was no traffic, and he was old enough to be wary of opening up the old Triumph on a country highway that might hide patches ice in the shade. 

_A wreck out here will kill you,_ the little voice in his head whispered.

If not the wreck, then the hospital certainly would. 

He turned the bike around and rode home slowly in the cold and quiet.

\---

At first Wilson kept up with how many of his patients died, a kind of running tally of grief in the back of his head, but eventually the long days ran together and he, like the rest of the staff, began to lose one after the other, with the dead and soon-to-be dead barely separated. 

He was so exhausted that at first it seemed to be just his imagination that the intervals between the ambulances grew longer, that more people came in and didn’t go straight to ICU. 

On the forty-second day, he slept through the night in the on-call room without being awakened to try to keep someone alive. At the morning staff meeting, new schedules were passed around, and he didn’t get one. 

“Tomorrow’s your last shift, Dr. Wilson,” the ER director said. “Dr. Stevenson’s recovered and coming back to work.” 

\---

“I thought we had a case of face shields,” the nurse said as she and Wilson looked at the empty boxes.

“We did, but that was two weeks ago. Everybody’s been reusing and cleaning them.”

She looked around. “Were the saved ones thrown away? This is crazy!”

“Things happen,” Wilson said. He handed her the lone face shield. “Take it. I’ll stand back.”

Fate, Wilson thought later, seemed to carry a particular grudge against him. He’d given away the shield – caps were also as rare as white rhinos – on his last day, only to have a patient cough blood onto his head. That the patient was nearly seven feet tall, fantastically intoxicated, and Wilson was doing his best to hold him on the gurney just added to the ridiculousness of it all.

“I’m out!” Wilson shouted. Someone pushed a towel into his hand and he mopped his face. 

“Get cleaned up. We’ve got it,” the nurse said. 

The shakes started in the shower, after he’d stripped off and stuffed his clothes in the biohazard bin, after he’d sluiced the blood from his hair and realized the tiny bar of soap was the only thing he had to cleanse himself. 

He washed until the bar was a sliver, then climbed out of the shower, retrieved House’s bottle of Luksusowa vodka from his locker and poured it over his head in the shower. 

\---

Wilson left the duffel bag, just as House told him to. His car, despite being parked so long in the hospital garage, valiantly started on the first try. He sat behind the wheel and picked up the coat he’d left on the passenger seat forty-four days earlier. It smelled of cold leather and a faint memory of fancy aftershave that House liked to mock. 

The coat’s weight on his lap was comforting, and he sat for a moment longer before putting the car into gear and driving slowly out into the sunlight.

\---

Being alone absolutely sucked. In his lifetime of bad behavior, House had always been certain that he had enough resources inside his head to keep himself entertained no matter how long he was confined to the corner, his room, after school detention, jail, house arrest, or whatever else authority figures had in mind as punishment. But life without Wilson was entirely different this time. He was lonely and he hated to admit it.

He needed better bourbon, a better pantry, a housekeeper, a five-gallon pail of Vicodin, and Wilson, although not necessarily in that order. 

He re-draped the damp cookbook over the dish rack and pulled out his phone. No texts. Never an ETA as to when Wilson might be let out of service to humanity and be headed back north. 

\---

House was in the kitchen, making coffee to improve the taste of second-class bourbon, when keys rattled in the door lock and he damned near dropped the pot in his haste to put it down and get to the door.

Wilson was on the other side of it: gaunt, wearing a set of green scrubs, carrying his jacket and smelling suspiciously of vodka. 

“Honey, you’re home,” House said.

Wilson walked straight past him into the kitchen, picked up House’s mug and took a long swallow. He looked around, as if he’d just entered an entirely new world straight off an alien spacecraft.

“The window’s broken.”

“Cooking accident.”

“I need a shower,” Wilson said and turned away. 

\---

House paced the entire time the shower was running. He'd known it was bad, but Wilson looked completely shell-shocked. _How did he drive like that?_ House stifled to urge to go check Wilson's old Volvo for body parts in the front grill, fearing missing Wilson's emergence from the bathroom if he did. 

\---

In the bathroom, Wilson found House’s beard trimmer on the sink and looked in the mirror at his hair. 

\---

“Christ, Wilson, what happened?” House half-yelped when the bathroom door opened.

“A lot of things,” Wilson said. He was shivering, still wet from the shower, a clean pair of boxers and an undershirt twisted around him. His hair was unevenly shorn, hacked away with the beard trimmer to within a quarter inch of his scalp. He looked both unbearably young and old, as if he’d been caught in the middle of some particularly devious wizard’s curse, with his cheekbones sharp as glass under his skin. 

“To your hair?”

“It had blood in it. It felt dirty.”

House picked up the blanket from the sofa and draped it around Wilson’s shoulders. Wilson felt pinned by House’s gaze, a look that missed that nothing, saw everything and put all the pieces together. He suddenly and fiercely wished it would be that easy, that House could just look at him and see all the ones who suffered, suffocated and died. But it would never be so simple. Not even House could know the stories without words.

“Sit down. I’ll bring you some coffee.”

“House,” he said urgently. “I have to tell you …” 

“We have plenty of time,” House said. His hand came to rest on the back of Wilson’s neck, and Wilson moved in, his arms closing around House and his head tucking into House’s shoulder. 

_Oh, this_ , Wilson thought. _This is home._

He turned his face into House's shirt and breathed in the scent of clean cotton and warm skin. "Missed you," he said, and House, standing only slightly off-kilter on his lame leg, put both arms around him to hold him tightly, as if he'd never let him go again. 

“It’s okay,” House said, his voice breaking in the quiet room. “There's time. Now we have time.”

_-The End-_


End file.
